The great health care reform word count scandal of 2009!

There is a scandal brewing on the right-wing media, and sides are being chosen.

Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform claims that the word “shall” appears in the health care reform bill 3,424 times. But the Weekly Standard and Rep. Mike Pence insist that “shall” appears 3,425 times.

Why, the national shame of having a health care reform bill that contains a whole bunch of pages has nothing on this. If conservatives can't agree on how many times the word “shall” appears in the bill, what can they agree on?

Which side will you be on? Who in the right-wing media will get to the bottom of this burgeoning scandal? Let loose the blogs of war!

(Or, you know, maybe somebody just missed something when they copied-and-pasted the bill into Microsoft Word in order to run the “word count” function on “shall.”)